Jobs saw Xerox’s mouse GUI and bet Apple’s future on it
Steven Paul Jobs (1955–2011) co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and helped drive the personal-computer revolution. After Reed College and a 1974 India trip, he studied Zen. A 1979 look at the Xerox Alto’s mouse and GUI fed the Lisa (1983) and the breakthrough Macintosh—before a 1985 board fight pushed him out to found NeXT.
He was born in San Francisco to Joanne Schieble, a Wisconsin Catholic of Swiss-German descent, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian political science student. Schieble wanted college graduates to adopt him; the chosen lawyer and his wife backed out on learning the baby was a boy, so he went to Paul Jobs, a Coast Guard veteran and mechanic, and his wife Clara. Paul built his son a garage workbench, and by 1959 the family lived in Mountain View. Jobs was a restless, prank-playing pupil who skipped fifth grade, and in 1967 his parents spent their savings on a house in Los Altos whose garage would later become Apple's first home and a historic site in 2013.
At 13 he cold-called Bill Hewlett and landed a summer job at Hewlett-Packard. At Homestead High, classmate Bill Fernandez, later Apple's first employee, introduced him to Steve Wozniak. Jobs read Shakespeare and Plato alongside electronics, and after an Esquire article in 1971 he and Wozniak built and sold illegal blue boxes that placed free long-distance calls. He enrolled at Reed College in Portland in September 1972, applying nowhere else, and befriended student body president Robert Friedland.
Apple's first product was Wozniak's Apple I, and the Apple II a year later made the pair rich. The Macintosh 128K of 1984 was the first mass-produced computer with a graphical interface, and paired with the LaserWriter, the first laser printer with PostScript, it launched desktop publishing in 1985. After his ouster he bought Lucasfilm's graphics division, which became Pixar and made Toy Story, the first computer-animated feature, in 1995.
Apple bought NeXT in 1997 and brought him back as chief executive when the company was close to bankruptcy. Working with designer Jony Ive, he followed the Think different campaign with the iMac, iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, App Store and iPad. He was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour in 2003.
Source: Steve Jobs
